LOS ANGELES, CA.- Gagosian announced its participation in Frieze Los Angeles 2026 with a selection of works by California masters including Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Gehry, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in dialogue with new and recent works by artists from the gallery’s Los Angeles stable or who have exhibited at the Beverly Hills location, including Louise Bonnet, Chris Burden, Urs Fischer, Piero Golia, Mark Grotjahn, Jennifer Guidi, Lauren Halsey, Alex Israel, Nancy Rubins, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Honor Titus, Mary Weatherford, Jordan Wolfson, and Jonas Wood. The presentation celebrates California’s continuing vitality as an artistic hub by exploring multiple facets of its cultural influence.
Israel’s painting Paramount Pictures (2025) is the first new work from Noir (2024–), a series of streetscapes exploring the seductive duplicity of Hollywood, to have been shown since the artist’s exhibition at the Beverly Hills gallery in 2025. Working with animators to produce digital renderings, and with a Warner Bros. scenic artist to translate those images into paintings, Israel generates uncanny, dreamlike vignettes in which the city’s mythic, analog past and mediated, virtual present overlap. Golia’s Mariachi Painting #8 (2016) also references the world of cinema. One of twelve paintings showing fragments of a curtain printed with the Looney Tunes “That’s All Folks!” graphic, it was created following the closing celebrations for Chalet Dallas, the artist’s project for Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center.
In her sculpture LODA PLAZA II (2025), Halsey throws light on another aspect of the city, paying homage to the signage of Black- and Brown-owned businesses in Los Angeles; this underscores the roles that communities and institutions play in stewarding LA’s working-class districts amid inequality and violence. Also mirroring the vicissitudes of the city’s urban planning, the mini-tower of Burden’s 5 Foot Stepped Skyscraper (2014–23) playfully tests the limits of metropolitan development using handmade metal construction toy parts. And Titus, in his painting The Fair Way (2024), examines golf course design, reframing a ritualized activity to expose the operation of privilege and class.
Other artists in the presentation reflect on California’s abundant flora and fauna. In Two Vases with Flowers on White (1988), Hockney juxtaposes two flower arrangements in an elegant still life, while Ruby uses ceramics to represent a botanical form in FLOWER (9032) (2025), employing the kiln as an instrument of ritual transformation. Gehry’s sculpture Fish on Fire (2023), one of several of the late architect’s elaborations on objects from the Fish Lamps series (1984–86 and 2012–), and the last to be made in copper, renders the undulating “perfect form” of an ancient creature.
California has a long and distinguished history of abstraction, and in the luminous Ocean Park #108 (1978), Diebenkorn distills its ambience into bands of color, a radiant orange strip at the painting’s top evoking a Santa Monica sunset. In Drawing (2021), Rubins covers the surface of a bundle of paper in graphite, lending it the appearance of liquid metal. Weatherford’s painting Saffron Emerald Split (2026) features a colored neon tube affixed to a field of vinyl emulsion paint, alluding to both urban and rural environments through a play on color, gesture, and the tension between image and actuality. Ruby’s Turbine. Intercontinental 9122. (2026), meanwhile, features intersecting diagonals that suggest explosive natural and mechanical forces.
Finally, some works on view depart from material reality to explore California’s dreamscape, within which signifiers of freedom and creativity are shadowed by wilder, darker visions. Bonnet’s Bra 1 (2025) belongs to a series of paintings that show people struggling to dress, but without depicting the garments themselves, resulting in awkward contortions, while in two elaborate and unsettling Dream Drawings from 1996 and 2008, Shaw plumbs the depths of his own subconscious as it intersects with waking life.
On Wednesday, February 25, Gagosian is participating in the Beverly Hills Art Walk and will remain open until 7pm. Sarah Sze: Feel Free, the artist’s debut gallery exhibition in Los Angeles, is on view.
